A Chinese Blog

Part of the attraction of writing a blog is to read the comments written by people who read it. There aren't so many comments on this EuropaWorld blog. Maybe not many people read it, or if they do read it, find something of note to comment about. Twenty or thirty comments is usually reckoned to be an excellent harvest for a personal blog, most people's blogs excite far fewer.

We are obviously playing in a minor and forgotten league, for China's top blogger, Xu Jinglei, apparently averages more than 1000 comments regularly on her blogs. Less than this figure suggests that she is having an off day. And she spends, apparently and according to The (London) Times that reported the story only 20 minutes each day on the keys of her laptop composing the blog.

Although Xu Jinglei is an actress and a film director with an international reputation it is her postings about everyday life her public really enjoy. She writes almost everyday, updating her accounts two or three times a day if necessary.

Figuring prominently on the blog are her cats whose names translate as Scarf and Apron. No blog, it seems, can be considered complete withouit its usual complement of furry animals.

See http://blog.sina.com.cn/xujinglei but as might be expected, it is in Chinese.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

When I was very young I treasured a beautiful and inventive book of black and white drawings of ancient railways in various states of cartoon dilapidation. If memory serves me right, which these days it does rarely, the book was called 'Heath Robinson's Railway Ribaldry' and on those dull, wet and otherwise empty afternoons that seem to be the endless lot of the only child, I spent happy hours pouring over its pages.

In due course I ceased to be an only child but not before one picture in particular had become deeply imprinted on my young brain. This showed an engine driver braving the displeasure of his passengers to halt his express for the purpose of retrieving an egg that just happened to have been left on the railway line.

The justification for this heinous offence against the railway timetable appeared in large letters at the bottom "Waste Not, Want Not" is the Driver's Motto."

Such sensible sentiments - the world would be a deal better off, I feel, if only we could be persuaded to adopt its precept en masse - are certainly not to be trifled with. Indeed they were drilled into me at every turn it by looming figures in authority. As I was then only four most authority figures seemed to loom, in particular my grandmother.

"What will the dustbin men say?" she used to entreat sternly when she noticed a few scrapings of unappetizing egg-white left behind in the shell of my boiled egg. She had a reason of course: this was the time of post-war austerity when eggs were rationed and treated as a precious resource. It was also the age before we taught hens the sensible feat of laying eggs in the winter months. If we wanted eggs in December they would come dubiously pickled in isinglass.

Quite what my grandmother would have made of the finding that apparently we throw away a quarter of all the food we purchase, I cannot think. She had never heard of the word sustainability and yet she begrudged throwing anything in the bin that could possibly be eaten, mended or used again in some way.

As a result I grew up believing that wasting anything was wrong and wasting food a kind of moral sin for which I would be found out (no doubt by those bogie dustbin men) and subjected to some long and humiliating chastisement.

I carry this mental baggage with me still almost sixty years later. I still hate throwing food away and go on wearing clothes far longer than practicality dictates. True, I have never quite reached the stage of turning my old carpets into hats - which is, so I learn, what we were urged to do in those austere times - but conjuring a decent meal from a few manky and improbable remnants left behind in the vegetable rack or refrigerator has become my speciality.

Last evening my skills in this useful compartment of human knowledge were again put to the test. I had purchased earlier in the day some splendid pork sausages made locally from free-range beasts that are actually allowed to wallow in the mud. But sausages demand accompaniment and accompaniment seemed in short supply.

For if Mother Hubbard's cupboard was not exactly bare, that was only because Mother Hubbard had been too lazy to clean it out. Indeed, it was a wonder that the contents had not walked out under their own steam in search of more congenial accommodation on the compost heap.

I counted one red onion of venerable vintage, one large courgette, going soft at one end, one large box of mushrooms, reduced for quick sale and bought a week ago with the optimistic idea of making soup; a half bottle of passata first opened goodness knows when, half a tub of cream ditto, and a small bowl of cooked rice of uncertain provenance.

Still, waste not, want not! Into a roasting dish went the sliced onion, courgette and some garlic. On these I laid the sausages, liberally sprinkled with olive oil, salt and a little tabasco, covered these with a deluge of mushrooms left whole, emptied the bottle of passata and the tub of cream over the mixture, dusted the whole liberally with oregano and added the rice as a species of improbable topping. Then into the hot oven it went for the best part of an hour.

Though I say it myself, this gastronomic cacophony turned out most remarkably well: the sausages lush, the vegetables wonderfully tasty. And though it might astonish the health and safety folk brimming with all those injunctions about sell by dates and what have you, we are still here to tell the tale.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

UNESCO Comes to Cardiff

Talking of UNESCO,(see last blog) the annual UK UNESCO conference was held in Cardiff at the weekend, graced by the presence of the Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, who gave the keynote speech. The conference was preceded the evening before by a reception in the Welsh Senedd, or Parliament, building in Cardiff Bay and by a dinner at the National Museum of Wales. The latter proved not altogether propitious surroundings for a dinner - the vast echoing marble hall of the museum providing plenty of space but doing little for the acoustics - so that it became more than an effort to discern what your dinner companion was saying across the large round tables. Nevertheless both food and wine were excellent.

Indeed perhaps it was perhaps this excellence coupled with the poverty of the acoustics that made Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the UK's UN ambassador, who was giving the address, chide the audience that it was slow in picking up some of his intended jokes. On the other hand it could have been because he is a rather better ambassador than he is a comic. Or maybe again again it might have been that we were simply an earnest audience not given to easy frivolity.

In this we may be taking our lead from Mr Matsuura himself who in public at least gives the impression that red hot pokers would not persuade him to attempt a joke. His keynote speech was thus well reasoned and delivered in a deliberate and most earnest fashion. He argued carefully and thoughtfully, as indeed Sir Emyr had also done, the need for reform at the UN, while explaining the relevance of UNESCO to the wider world.

UNESCO is of course a catalyst. Its financial resources are minute but it serves to galvanise mostly voluntary efforts towards common goals throughout the 180 countries that it works in. Its goal is to construct the idea of peace in people's minds - as an alternative to conflict and war - and to do that through the intellectual processes of education, culture, the various sciences, communication and information.

What will the world look like in the future? Hopefully we shall be better educated, with technology used to more productive ends; we shall be better informed and by recognising and respecting each other's cultures we shall come closer together. The future is overpredicted and underimagined said Chris Jofeh, director of Arup's who sponsored the conference, quoting one of a team of Arup futurologists. He gave us a remarkable address on the 'drivers of change.' It is true, we can't predict the future, but we can imagine a better, more just and more peaceful world. And by working with and through UNESCO we can help to bring that about.

Reunion

I was back at my old college in Cambridge for a reunion dinner on Saturday. They hold them every year. Mostly it is the older people who come. It is over forty years now since I first set foot in the college, but the oldest person there had come up seventy years before.

It is surprisingly easy to chat to those who once were your fellow students - the years drop away. Most people do not change all that much. They retain the same personalities and eccentricities that you remember from way back. I happened to be sat next to someone who lived opposite me on the same staircase. He had spent his career with the UN and now was doing consultancy work for UNESCO. As I serve on the UNESCO Committee for Wales, we had a common point of contact.

The College doesn't change either; except perhaps in two regards - the gardens are even better kept than they were then, and it now admits women both as students and to serve in Hall.

I suppose for 700 years it has seemed natural that this should have been a male only college, just as other colleges were for women. Certainly the rather primitive bathroom arrangements - there were no lavatories in the building where I lived and you had to descend a staircase and cross a court to wash or take a shower - would not have suited women. Today, things have changed of course.

Now having women in the college just seems natural, though of course, there were none amongst our generation. I am sure that the move to co-education, to end this arbitrary gender divide should have been made far earlier. Times have changed and the college has changed too.

We might have been on the cusp of another change for this dinner was the very last at which it might have been permissible - by law - to smoke after the loyal toast. Today, I write of the 1 July, smoking is banned in all enclosed public spaces in England. It might be a moot point whether the College Hall constitutes a 'public space,' but as people have to work in it - serving dinner and clearing the plates - I suppose it is. Nevertheless the point is academic for there has been no smoking in the Hall for as long as I can remember.

What better way to work off the effects of a four course dinner then with a spot of rowing the following morning. I used to row a great deal when I was there and I still like to go out in a boat on occasions such as these. We are all a little rusty and of course unfit, but rowing is a little like riding a bicycle: you don't really forget how to do it.

This weekend I was in the baby in the boat. The combined ages of our four oarsmen and cox, must have totalled over three hundred and twenty years. The body is stiff and protesting at first, but gradually the old rhythm returns and provided you stop from time to time for the crew to catch its breath the experience is just like old times.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry

Scribbling in the Rain: Reflections on Umbrellas

EuropaWorld reports so often from dry and dusty parts of the world where water is short that we sometimes forget how lucky we are here in the UK to have plenty of it - most of the time at least. When school girls in Afghanistan are blown up as a result of terrorism or deliberate attempts to stop the education of women again we forget how lucky we are here to have the opportunities we do. So here is a little piece I wrote when it rained the other day and I happened to be looking out of the window.

It is pouring with rain and so dark that I've had to switch the light on. Not that there's much of that; the bulb is one of those energy efficient whats-its that take half an hour to come out of hibernation, so I'm writing this in semi-darkness. What ever happened to flaming June?

A girl has just walked past outside, oblivious to the rain. Even the girls these days are macho; coats being something created uniquely for old folk and wimps. They have no embarassment at turning up somewhere drenched to the skin, their garments transparent with wetness. Another example of our retreat from civilisation, I suppose.

Now the rain is driving, if not horizontally, then at 45 degrees. The girl, on her way to school presumably, stops and extracts a baby umbrella from somewhere about her person; she erects it above her head. It is so small that it looks like one of those creations that clowns carry when balancing on the high wire. Safe under its shelter she saunters out of sight.

What a curious thing is an umbrella, I reflect! A little roof that you unfold and carry above you on a stick to shade off the rain or the sun. When were umbrellas invented? I'd hazard a guess at the eighteenth century. And they still look quaint and old-fashioned even when machined from plastic and aluminium and upholstered in today's bright colours.

What other eighteenth century Heath Robinsonian inventions are left to us in daily use, I wonder? Cutlery, I suppose, and dinner plates; mirrors perhaps - but nothing surely as mechanical as an umbrella unless it be the cuckoo clock or the fan. But who uses a fan today? Whereas we would not hesitate to pull an umbrella from our handbags, to pull out a fan today at some social gathering is to invite knowing glances and sotto voce charges of eccentricity.

Unless we were showing off, of course, and pulled out one of those whirly electric contraptions whose blades spin round like a grasscutter. But how does one make eyes at someone from behind a battery operated mini-helicopter? Yet another example of technology killing
civilisation.

I see now that it has brightened up considerably. The electric light is fully charged and the sun has come out (ish). There's no longer an umbrella in sight. I shall leave my bah-humbug mood behind and get on with the work.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

A CALL TO PRESERVE TRADITIONAL LIVESTOCK

A warning this week from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) about the loss of genetic resources in agriculture. Basically because we are all consuming more livestock products, farmers and agri-businesses are turning to those breeds that produce the most meat, milk and eggs. This means that many traditional breeds are losing out and in some cases becoming extinct. Indeed 84 breeds of domestic farm animal have become extinct in the last seven years, say FAO - that is one every month, and 20 per cent of the world’s cattle, goat, pig, horse and poultry breeds are in danger of annihilation.

This matters of course because once a breed is lost the genetic resources are lost too. Quite apart from the matter of taste - many of the traditional breeds produce better quality products because of their slow growing nature - genetic diversity is needed for cross-breeding to meet new demands and circumstances that are now not foreseen.

I have always been a great fan of traditional or 'rare' breeds. We used to keep Norfolk Blue chickens that laid lovely brown eggs with bright orange yolks. Not quite in the industrial quantities that modern hybrid hens are bred to produce, but a lot better tasting. We find that the traditional breeds of pig - Tamworths, Saddlebacks, Gloucester Old Spots, for example - also taste better, especially if they have been slow-reared in outdoor conditions.

In Europe and North America the displacement of traditional breeds is now almost complete in mainstream agriculture. Since the mid-twentieth century, a few high-performance breeds, usually of European descent – including Holstein-Friesian (by far the most widespread breed, reported in at least 128 countries and in all regions of the world) and Jersey cattle; Large White, Duroc and Landrace pigs; Saanen goats; and Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens – have spread throughout the world.

But now, say FAO, they are crowding out traditional breed in many developing countries, even when conditions may not be fully suited to their rearing. In Vietnam, for example, the percentage of indigenous sows has declined from 72 percent of the total population in 1994 to only 26 percent in 2002. Of the 14 local Vietnamese breeds, five are vulnerable, two in a critical state and three are facing extinction. In Kenya, introduction of the Dorper sheep has caused the almost complete disappearance of pure-bred Red Maasai sheep.

The FAO is less sure of its ground when it comes to what should be done. It has called for improved conservation programmes and says that these statistics are a 'wake-up' call - as indeed they are. But merely stressing the need to bolster global food supply by maintaining and deploying a wide array of vital and irreplaceable genetic resources is not likely to persuade a hard-pressed farmer in the developing world not to sire his traditional dairy cows with a Friesian bull.

Still, if you have any better ideas, I am sure that the Rome based FAO will be very pleased to hear from you.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

No Easy Route from Iraq to Europe

Life continues to worsen for ordinary Iraqis. Indeed so bad has it become that more than 4 million have fled their homes, according to UN estimates - something like one in six of the population. Half of these are still in Iraq, sheltering where best they can but more than two million have sought refuge in neighbouring states which now face an overwhelming problem of providing for the new arrivals.

"The magnitude of the crisis is staggering," said Jennifer Pagonis, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently. Jordan and Syria are carrying most of the burden but calls for increased international support for governments in the region have so far brought few results.

Beyond Iraq's immediate neighbours - particularly in Europe - recognition rates of Iraqis remain low, says UNHCR.

What this can mean is well illustrated by the plight of an Iraqi couple - Christians as it happens - who remain in a safe but unedifying limbo as two European countries dispute whose responsibility they are.

To protect them UNHCR has not released their names. They are currently being held in the Steenokkerzeel Detention Centre near Brussels Airport, unable to communicate with staff, confused about the reasons for their four-month detention and angry about their treatment as asylum seekers,” the agency said.

The agency has called on the Belgian authorities to allow the couple to remain in Belgian were their son is in the process of becoming a Belgian citizen. But their case reflects the problems that many asylum seekers face.

Under the provisions of the European Union's 2003 Dublin Regulations the country where a refugee arrives first has the responsibility for examining any claim for asylum. In practice, this can lead to people being held in detention in
one European member state prior to being sent back to another European country considered responsible for their claim.

In this case the Iraqi couple have been shuttled back and forth between Greece and Belgium. Originally from Zakho in northern Iraq, they lived for 30 years in Baghdad, running a grocery store and raising their four children. The family fled after armed men raided their home in December 2004 threatening to kill them if they
did not produce $50,000 within 10 days.

In Greece, they were detained for three months on the grounds of illegal entry. They applied for asylum during this time, but this was rejected. Nor could they appeal as Greece has suspended all decision-making on Iraqi cases at the appeal level since 2003.

In November 2005, the couple paid a human trafficker to bring them to Belgium, where their son is about to become a Belgian citizen. On arrival, they asked for asylum. Again, they were detained and then sent back to Greece, where they were held for two weeks at the airport.

Belgium argued that Greece was responsible for their asylum claim under the Dublin rule. But UNHCR point out that the regulation allows a member state to take over processing of a case for humanitarian reasons, particularly where there are family considerations.

The Greek authorities again issued an order for the couple to leave – on the grounds that their case had already been considered and was now closed. With the help of a local priest, they tried to apply for asylum again. They were told they had only been freed because of their age and must leave the country immediately, even though they had nowhere to go.

Earlier this year, they then paid another "agent" to get them back into Belgium and they were detained on arrival at Brussels Airport on 7 February. “They are now hoping that another hearing into their case will end their ordeal and reunite the family,” said UNHCR.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry